Hebrew Month Meditations

“Speak to the children of Israel and say to them: when one of you offers a sacrifice to the Lord, the sacrifice must be taken from the cattle, sheep or goats” (Lev. 1:2).

Or so the verse would read if it were constructed according to the normal rules of grammar. However, in Hebrew the word order of the sentence is strange and unexpected. We would expect to read: adam mikem ki yakriv, “when one of you offers a sacrifice”. Instead what it says is adam ki yakriv mikem, “when one offers a sacrifice of you”. The essence of sacrifice, said R. Shneor Zalman, is that we offer ourselves. We bring to G-d our faculties, our energies, our thoughts and emotions. The physical form of sacrifice -an animal offered on the altar – is only an external manifestation of an inner act. The real sacrifice is mikem, “of you”. We give G-d something of ourselves. ~ Rabbi Sacks, Self and Sacrifice

It’s like a light going through a prism and being broken out into different colors. If it’s coming through a holiday, a mitzvah, or lighting candles, it’s the same light bouncing into the world and being refracted through a different means. We pick it up and experience it in different ways. But it’s really all the same light.*

Like this:

Then I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was, making something on the wheel. But the vessel that he was making of clay was spoiled in the hand of the potter; so he remade it into another vessel, as it pleased the potter to make. Jeremiah 18:3-4

Like this:

For thus said He who high aloft forever dwells, whose name is holy:
I dwell on high, in holiness, yet with the contrite and the humble of spirit – reviving the spirits of the humble, reviving the hearts of the contrite. (Isaiah 57:15)